


nightlight

by kojum



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-20
Updated: 2012-08-20
Packaged: 2019-08-09 01:06:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16440194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kojum/pseuds/kojum
Summary: Of all the things she's been through, she still believes Aperture's cruelest trick was the windows.





	nightlight

**Author's Note:**

> reposted to the Archive on 10/28/18 with minor wording changes from the original version.

The windows are infuriating.

In the beginning they’re in most of the chambers, just these small little alcoves cut so that she can't get anything in them but her left hand and part of her arm. But it’s not the holes themselves she’s interested in; it’s the light. The light that streams through the square holes is the warmest thing in the test chambers, the _only_ thing that isn’t stark gray and sterile, and there’s more than a few times that she catches herself just standing and staring at the little specks of dust lazily dancing in the light beams. It thrills her to stand near a window and bask in its warmth, to savor the one part of the chambers that isn’t perfectly and permanently set just a little too cold to get used to, but there’s always a nagging voice at the back of her mind that makes her wonder just what, exactly, is behind them. To figure out just where those beautiful lights are coming from.

In the tenth chamber—is it the tenth? They all blend together after a while—she decides to kneel down and see for herself. The angle is awkward and her knee replacements force her to bend her neck, arms, and back into strange positions just so she can put her face to the opening, but she manages to do it.

Unfortunately, the effort turns out to be wasted. The light is much brighter than she expected to be and it makes it impossible to see anything through the glass, and after a second she has to look away to rub the stars out of her eyes. She tries again and again to look longer on the off-chance that she’ll see something, _anything,_ but each time she only lasts a few moments before she’s forced to look back at the dark gray panels on the opposite wall and blink away the black-edged spots. When she finally gets up and continues on, she convinces herself that the pounding in her ears and the tears beading in her eyes are just from being in such a strange position and spending the better part of a half an hour (she guesses; there’s no such thing as time in this place) staring at the sun.

It’s not until later, when she’s sprinting around every corner and praying the scribbled red arrows aren’t just another trap and fighting to ignore the rising panic in that ever-present robotic voice, that she realizes those windows were never to the outside. If anything, they were probably just carefully calibrated lamps pointed through the small, strangely cut recesses, everything tuned and adjusted to make her imagine actual lights at the end of those nineteen tunnels. To make her imagine that the outside wasn’t miles and miles away, wasn’t just a pipe dream in this endless nightmare.

Those damn tears again. She brushes them off, flicks them over the rusty guardrail to get lost in the endless pound of the pistons behind her, and keeps running. Fine, then—if Aperture isn't going to give her a light, she'll just have to make her own.


End file.
